Abraham Hulk Senior Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

5-1-1813 London, ENG - 3-23-1897 Zevenaar, NED

Abraham Hulk Senior became one of the well-known marine seascape painters in the nineteenth century and the patriarch of a whole family of Anglo-Dutch painters. He first studied to paint portraits under the portrait painter, Jean Augustin Daiwaille and after that more training at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam.

When he was twenty years old Abraham Hulk Senior sailed to New York and then to Boston, where he exhibited between 1833 to 1834. In 1834 he returned to the Netherlands where he lived in Amsterdam for a few months and then in The Hague and Leeuwarden. In 1870 he settled in London, where he spent the rest of his life and exhibited at the Royal Academy, where he entered three paintings, two of them Dutch seascapes. He became one of the great marine painters and well known for his ability to paint the sea and its ships in such different ways. Abraham Hulk Senior is frequently mistaken as a Dutch artist due to the strong Dutch influence and subject matter of his paintings. Most biographies say that he died in London, he actually died on a short visit to the Netherlands to visit his friends and sons.

Abraham Hulk Senior was the teacher not only to his sons Willem Frederik Hulk, Johannes Frederik Hulk Junior and Abraham Hulk Junior but also to his brother Johannes Frederik and also to the painter Adrianus David Hilleveld.